Amazon logs back into brick & mortar

Explaining its volte-face, Amazon said it is “applying 20 years of online bookselling experience to build a store that integrates the benefits of offline and online book shopping.”Chidanand Rajghatta | TNN | November 05, 2015, 09:00 IST

WASHINGTON: The comedian Jerry Seinfeld once said a bookstore is the only piece of evidence we have that people are thinking. Whether he factored in the migration of bookstores to the digital world is not known, but the entertainer could be among those chuffed at the news that Amazon, the online giant that decimated brick-andmortar outlets, itself opened a book store on Tuesday.

“Dear Amazon customer, Tuesday morning at 9:30, Amazon Books will open its doors. These aren’t metaphorical doors: these real, wooden doors are the entrance to our new store in Seattle’s University Village. Amazon Books is a physical extension of Amazon. com,” the $ 88 billion retail behemoth said. Earlier this year, Amazon surpassed Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the US by market capitalization.

Explaining its volte-face, Amazon said it is “applying 20 years of online bookselling experience to build a store that integrates the benefits of offline and online book shopping.” The books in the store will be selected based on Amazon.com customer ratings, pre-orders, sales, and assessment by curators. Store prices will match online prices and Amazon devices such as Kindle, Echo, Fire TV, and Fire Tablet will also be available.

The Amazon Books now occupies a brick-and-mortar storefront in the same shopping center where a Barnes & Noble used to be before shuttering its doors in 2011. More than 10,000 book stores have shut down in the US since 2004, when the country had 38,500 outlets. Recent reports project that by 2018, only around 22,500 bookstoreswill be operational in the US.

The Amazon foray appears to be an attempt to assess the behavior of customers, with recent indication that many are choosing to return to traditional “dead tree” reading habit.

The experiment could have an important bearing in India, which in recent years has experienced a growth in chain stores at the expense of independent outlets, even as Amazon itself has ramped up its online operations. In fact, Amazon.com has been the grooming ground for several online entrepreneurs , including Flipkart’s Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, and Instacart’s Apoorva Mehta.

“A divorce could reshape the global wealth ranking. If the couple split their fortune equally, it could leave wife MacKenzie with $69 billion, making her world’s richest woman. It could also make Microsoft's Bill Gates the planet’s richest person once again,” reported Bloomberg. Amazon founder Bezos was dating Lauren Sanchez, a 49-year-old ex-news anchor.